Is Shadow Priest supposed to be this miserable?

[Yvaelle]

Good suggestions below Feerdy

Possible quality of life/DPS fixes, I do realize this would be an almost full rework of the spec and probably will never happen, also I am not suggesting all of these to be implemented, just ideas I have.

Void form should not have a cast time and not on the GCD, even better when we hit 100 insanity it should just happen.

It was like this on the beta and we really wanted control over it because it would often waste itself (ex. right as you exit combat, it would go off and burn out before you pulled the next thing).

What might be an interesting alternative 110 talent though would be something like this:

Whispers Of Oblivion - Voidform automatically activates at 100 Insanity, you no longer have access to Void Bolt (or Void Eruption, the button is gone), but Mind Blast is instant, Shadow Word: Death also works on targets above 80% HP, and Mind Flay deals Quad Damage (and Insanity) in Void Form.

Decrease the amount of extra haste from void form stacks and increase the insanity generation from abilities, so we can stay in longer but not be completely broken.

The frequent switching in/out was meant to address another problem from alpha/beta, where variously they experimented with longer but rarer voidforms, and also superfast but shorter voidforms - having them be more frequent but shorter was meant to make the loss of them feel less impactful when they procced during RP/at the death of a pull, etc.

A talent that changed this though would be cool

StM should not be a 10 minute raid cooldown. Instead, permanently buff Void form in another way rather than it's current buff to void form. Ideas?

StM is like, literally one of the first two spells they announced for any class this expansion. So tragically, I'm not sure it will ever go away. Before they were willing to confirm the existence of playable Demon Hunters, they were already telling us their plans to coax all the shadowpriests into genociding themselves for mediocre DPS. Tragically, I don't think it's going anywhere.

With that said, If I Were A Dev...

Into The Void - Increases maximum Insanity by 100 (200 cap), reduces Insanity decay by 50%, and Void Bolt is usable outside of Voidform (above 100 Insanity, casting Void Bolt enters Voidform, no Void Eruption).

Ability to instantly generate 100 insanity to enter void form on pulls.

They had something like this but took it away, I don't think we'll ever get that - part of our class identity is seemingly that we're pretty shit for the first 30 seconds of any fight.

Buff Mind sear damage or give the ability to spread dots for trash, this would not make us OP, seriously 10k ticks?

I swear Sphere of Insanity was designed with a DoT spread in mind, but they apparently never gave it to us (apart from the legendary), If we had a DoT spread mechanic - Sphere of Insanity might have been a great idea for interesting AOE gameplay - but without it - it doesn't make sense. Like if they designed Marksmen hunters with the Marked Target mechanic, but then forgot to give them away to apply the Marked Target debuff.... that's what Sphere feels like - like we have a bunch of spells that refer to a debuff we can't apply.

Lingering insanity should be baseline, getting to 30 stacks then re-entering void form just to lose it 5 seconds later is dumb.

I would be content if at least Void Eruption dealt increased damage based on the number of remaining Lingering Insanity stacks. Because yea, there may exist situations (for higher gear levels) where we would actually not want to enter Voidform because it may end up being a DPS loss to lose high insanity stacks (particularly for mass AOE with Mind Sear, or potentially even for mass multi-dot where the benefit of access to Void Bolt would be outweighed by the loss of haste to all our ticks). Right now it's a hypothetical problem, but I'd bet before the end of the expansion, Voidform being a DPS loss will be a real concern for Shadow.

A mechanic to refresh dots on all targets, could be worked with mind sear or mind flay?

I would like a talent that made it so Void Eruption applied VT+Pain to all targets in say, an 8 yard radius around your DoTted targets. We can think of something else to replace the legendary, but not only is my version a better version of the legendary, it's something that should be consistently available to Spriests - not reliant on a legendary to drop. It would also fix the Sphere problem.

[Woop Woop]

Good ideas there, but im not even sure the devs are aware of our problems. If they are, how come it wasnt adjusted in the beta?

[hablix]

Since they're so worried about Mind Sear overtaking Mind Flay, they need to just delete that piece of shit spell from the game and replace it with something that will actually make us feel useful on fast-dying trash packs. Or something. I don't know. Anything.

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I really wish shadow crash was baseline with a shorter CD, 20 second or something. It competing with mindbender and PI just blows.

Agree wholeheartedly! Get rid of Mind Sear since they can't figure out what to do with that spell anyway. Multi-dot and short high burst shadow crash, there's our AOE. That's what got me through WoD Mythic dungeons and it worked really well, I was competitive on trash but that strategy hasn't made the transition to Legion for some reason. Shadow Crash just ain't what it used to be. The damage could stay similar to what it is but the cooldown needs to be reduced.

[Yvaelle]

Good ideas there, but im not even sure the devs are aware of our problems. If they are, how come it wasnt adjusted in the beta?

I don't know, I tried a different approach this beta to giving them feedback privately, thinking they would respond better if they didn't feel like they had to be on the public defensive / weren't being chastised or ganged up on.

Mixed results, I think they hear more of our ideas now than ever before, but I also think they feel compelled to change every idea to make it their own. The community gave them interesting ideas, and they returned to us a cheap, lead-painted, imitation. I'm not sure if it's insecurity, but sometimes the best thing you can do as a leader (and applies equally to public game devs) is to accept that someone else has a better idea than you, and follow their lead - the WoW community is massive, very engaged, and quite creative: no matter how good at your job you are as a dev, you aren't going to out-create 10 million engaged players (or whatever the playerbase is down to now).

I dream of an expansion in which the devs crowdsource the best ideas, and their role is simply to filter for the best ones. Instead it feels like every Monday morning their boss drags them all into Conference Room A, so that Janet The Peppy Intern can show them all the best ideas she found on the forums over the weekend, and they all close their ears and sip their coffee and dream of another hour of sleep, but even if they hear something interesting, need to mangle/distort it so they can take the credit.

Once the expansion is out, all the devs go on mental vacation for a couple months, so nothing will be done until Janet starts barking at them during the first raid tier when balance is in shambles, and they all suddenly wake up and scramble: that's the moment we need to catch them (by being loud) with our better ideas.

@Dawnrage @hablix
I wholeheartedly agree, delete Mind Sear. Shadow Crash baseline with a shorter cooldown, new talent in its place, perhaps even:

Sphere of Suffering: Replaces Shadow Crash (as a talent, but also replaces the spell on your bar). You generate a Sphere of Suffering at the target location. The Sphere pulses AOE damage every second for 5 seconds, and applies Shadow Word: Pain each time it deals damage.

[Relapses]

I may be a dissenting opinion but I'm fine with Shadow sucking dick at world questing since I can just use the same gear, spec Disc and be literally unkillable while doing 80-95% of the damage that I do as Shadow. I know that's not the most elegant solution but until we get enough gear to start one-to-two shotting world mobs, it's what I've been doing with great success.

[Dakiri]

Really, it would just be nice to have some kind of cleave. There's so much opportunity to make the AoE playstyle actually do meaningful damage while still keeping multi-dotting. Just increase the interaction between abilities.

Like, Void Ray is a perfect talent to change to "Mind Sear and Mind Flay deal X% extra damage per DoT effect on the targets hit." Or, "While targets are hit by Mind Flay/Mind Sear, DoT effects on those targets do X% more damage." Then you can throw out Mind Spike, add in some of the live Void Ray effect, and make it this: "Mind Sear stacks up to 5 on the main target. The next Mind Blast on that target will spread all DoT effects to targets within 8 yards."

Hooray! Talents synergy, AoE damage that still requires 8+ seconds of buildup and is still mostly DoT related but isn't a pain to manage, and even a reason to maybe even cast Mind Flay a bit more. It would be a godsend in 4+ target situations, would still be worse than normal multi-dotting in 2 or 3 target situations, and since the damage would mostly come from DoTs it wouldn't be overwhelmingly good in 8+ target situations. The numbers can all be balanced if it's too strong - maybe the DoT explosions only tick for half damage, or last half as long, etc.

If you love having Mind Spike around, just rename SW Void - it's basically just Mind Spike under a new name anyway. The biggest problem is that the level 60 row is already overcrowded with good talents, but I don't have a huge issue with "take these for pure AoE" talents - they would make running through dungeons a lot easier, even if single target boss damage suffered a bit by comparison. The flexibility and options would be lovely, at least.

[Relapses]

If you love having Mind Spike around, just rename SW Void - it's basically just Mind Spike under a new name anyway. The biggest problem is that the level 60 row is already overcrowded with good talents, but I don't have a huge issue with "take these for pure AoE" talents - they would make running through dungeons a lot easier, even if single target boss damage suffered a bit by comparison. The flexibility and options would be lovely, at least.

I honestly am anticipating them reworking Mind Spike at some point in this expansion. It's almost become a weird norm for Shadow at this point to have a single completely useless talent nobody uses, have the community complain about the uselessness of the talent for an entire raid tier then have the devs say, "Oh we realized nobody used this talent so we're gonna make it more useful now." (SW: Insanity vs. Insanity in MoP comes to mind.)

[Fascinate]

You should have tried BM hunter - I was doing 150k single target STEADY dps on bosses with 790 gear..

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I hate to break it for you but.. You're playing with terrible players. 200k on trash pulls? Loads of classes/specs do that single target, where as they do 500k+ on 4-5+ trash mobs.

160-200k dps isn't that great either with 827 ilvl.. My 790 110 hunter does 150k easily on single target bosses. I've seen other classes do 300k+ with your ilvl.

Tldr: If you're doing good with Spriest, you're playing with bad people. Any competent player will make you stay at rock bottom of the meter.

My MM hunter is 712 ilvl...

Also i just got attuned to arcway and no one will take me LOL. I forsee massive spriest aoe buffs, everyone knows we are garbo for dungeons. Whats funny is the group that turned me down has been looking for a DPS for over an hour (since not a lot of people are attuned) they would rather wait than take a spriest.

Just laughable.

[Alexieel]

One of my Talent ideas was something like:
Empty the mind
During mindflay, you clear your mind and neither get voidformstacks, insanity nor insanity drain.

So during mindflay we wouldnt change anything regarding voidform/insanity, it would pause the whole mechanic, but we could use it to skip the cooldowns of vbolt/mb/sw: D and void torrent. Would result in slower and longer and stronger voidforms.

[Woop Woop]

One of my Talent ideas was something like:
Empty the mind
During mindflay, you clear your mind and neither get voidformstacks, insanity nor insanity drain.

So during mindflay we wouldnt change anything regarding voidform/insanity, it would pause the whole mechanic, but we could use it to skip the cooldowns of vbolt/mb/sw: D and void torrent. Would result in slower and longer and stronger voidforms.

Damn, that is actually a really cool idea! Would you have it replace void ray or the mind spike talent?

[GT4]

That'd only result in an even longer ramp-up time and a worse experience in anything but long boss fights because now SP would have to be balanced around even higher void form stacks which would take even longer of chain-casting to reach.

I'd rather have Blizzard give options that help SPs perform in other scenarios, i.e. shorter fights and AoE fights.

E.g. Mind Spike could be reworked to something like this:

Mind Spike Talent
Replaces Mind Flay
40 yd range
1.5 sec cast
Requires Priest (Shadow)
Requires level 100
Assail the target with shadowy spikes, dealing (70% of Spell power) Shadowfrost damage and leaving a spike embedded in their mind.

Mind Blast will detonate these spikes, each dealing 100% of their original damage to the main target and to all nearby targets.

Generates 10 Insanity when used outside of void form. Generates a stack of void form during void form.

This would speed up our rotation by allowing you to get to void form more quickly and leave void form more quickly while still providing the void form stack haste that SP is balanced around. At the same time it'd provide a slighty increase in burst and cleave damage by having higher base damage than mind flay with an added AoE which can now be properly balanced around because of its drawback (= you can no longer keep up void form for very long).

[KaPe]

I'd like for something like Shadow Word: Void becoming baseline. No one is going to talent it anyway as long as Twist of Fate exists, and it offers burst insanity, perfect for entering Voidform quickly. It could even be unusable while in Voidform, or if you take Surrender to Madness, so it's mostly there to help with ramp up. Of course it doesn't help with AOE at all, but at least it would make world questing more bearable.

Also, damn that talent. Any potential buff has to also make sure it doesn't make S2M even more godly than it already is. And it's too "iconic" - despite being a new thing - to remove or make much weaker. Such a nuisance.

[Dakiri]

I'd like for something like Shadow Word: Void becoming baseline. No one is going to talent it anyway as long as Twist of Fate exists, and it offers burst insanity, perfect for entering Voidform quickly. It could even be unusable while in Voidform, or if you take Surrender to Madness, so it's mostly there to help with ramp up. Of course it doesn't help with AOE at all, but at least it would make world questing more bearable.

Also, damn that talent. Any potential buff has to also make sure it doesn't make S2M even more godly than it already is. And it's too "iconic" - despite being a new thing - to remove or make much weaker. Such a nuisance.

I don't know every other spec well enough to draw comparisons, so maybe everyone feels this way, but it certainly seems like there are tons of things that would really benefit the spec by becoming baseline. Reaper of Souls is just so good at cementing our execute abilities. Void Lord lessens that weird "you lose all your haste when you re-enter Void Form" mechanic. The legendary that gives Mind Blast 2 charges makes the rotation play much easier in all parts of the game. Shadow Crash is the only real AoE.

It honestly makes sense thematically - we're living on the edge, having to make tough choices between staying sane and going crazy. Like, S2M is all about tough choices of when to use it, and even Dispersion being both a very important offensive tool and also our defensive tool provides a real choice. The issue is that in practice, there is a lot of risk, and the reward doesn't seem significantly better than other specs. Maybe we'll see when raids come out and certain fights become about how many spriests you can stack...but there are also almost definitely going to be fights where Shadow does terribly as well.

[Deleted]

I am no priest expert by any means, and I have far from as much knowledge of the spec as many of you do, but I have to say a few things:
- Mind Sear doesn't hit for 9k. Even if it did, the damage goes up as you get stacks up to 5. It's still ridiculous, but it's untrue nonetheless.
- We do not do 70k AOE, nor do we sit at 100k ST. I play without StM, and I am around 210k AOE, and brush the 300k bar on BL fights. 180k ST is average on movement fights.
- I was feeling hopeless all theway to 830 ilvl, and after that, it became much better, competing with MM hunters and other balanced specs.
- Shadow is very punishing, it's very unrewarding, and requires much more APM than any other class I know or have tried, but we are most definitely on par, from my own experience. Granted it's only one person's experience, but it's something.

[Woop Woop]

I am no priest expert by any means, and I have far from as much knowledge of the spec as many of you do, but I have to say a few things:
- Mind Sear doesn't hit for 9k. Even if it did, the damage goes up as you get stacks up to 5. It's still ridiculous, but it's untrue nonetheless.
- We do not do 70k AOE, nor do we sit at 100k ST. I play without StM, and I am around 210k AOE, and brush the 300k bar on BL fights. 180k ST is average on movement fights.
- I was feeling hopeless all theway to 830 ilvl, and after that, it became much better, competing with MM hunters and other balanced specs.
- Shadow is very punishing, it's very unrewarding, and requires much more APM than any other class I know or have tried, but we are most definitely on par, from my own experience. Granted it's only one person's experience, but it's something.

Mindsear is actually in the 9k range, its only worth using for the insanity gain over mindflay.
200k 'aoe' is nothing compared to what other classes are capable of with 830+, im just sayin'.

[Alexieel]

That'd only result in an even longer ramp-up time and a worse experience in anything but long boss fights because now SP would have to be balanced around even higher void form stacks which would take even longer of chain-casting to reach.

Well the Talent wasnt an Idea for making our AoE stronger or smth like that, just some alternative for S2M, since LotV and MS feeling so underwhelming.

For AoE I would like that during the Mind Sear channel our Dots on the target deal their damage in the Mindsear AoE. That way it doesnt provide any DPS increase in a Single Target, but nig damage in AoE Situations

[Apero]

For AoE I would like that during the Mind Sear channel our Dots on the target deal their damage in the Mindsear AoE. That way it doesnt provide any DPS increase in a Single Target, but nig damage in AoE Situations

We already had that back in alpha (sort of).They should just make shadow crash baseline, reduce its cd, and the talent at its place should make it spread dots. Maybe with a cap of 5 targets or something to make it not overpowered.

But to be honest, im sick of the permanent underwhelming of priests, no mage, warlock or hunter (or suitable right now dh,rogue,monk) would ever say "but dont buff us to hard,keep us balanced". Thats why i would like some seriously ridiculous shit that make us a top AoE class But nothing is going to happen anyway,want to play priest in mythic+? Better go heal...

[Deleted]

From my experiences so far in dungeons and while solo I've had little trouble keeping up.

I don't really care about performance on trash, those are so quick any burst-based class will always do well. On bosses I'm near or at the top anyway (I'm not 110 yet so who knows this may change for me), and even then so if I were at the bottom I don't mind so long as I'm not so far behind that it's comically bad.

If I've learned anything about past expansions it's that adapting to what works best for you as a Shadow Priest gets you the farthest, and to treat any guides as a loose guideline that can (and needs) to be molded accordingly.

I feel that dungeons are all about trash now. Bosses are pushovers. People bring dps and tanks with trash performance first in mind.

[Dawnrage]

For anyone that cares and not that it wasn't unexpected, but since it's not in the patch notes - 2 piece t18 got nerfed pretty badly. Only reduces mindbender by 10 seconds and shadowfiend by 30 seconds now.

Also avoid the arcway (or enjoy the scenery), that place is aoe heaven. I did it with a geared WW monk, unholy DK, and tank DH and that was just miserable as hell considering they were doing constant big pulls (as well as most packs coming in big sizes). Barely got to touch any mobs. All of them pulling 300-500k dps and I can barely break 250 on some pulls if my group somehow didn't kill them in 15 seconds.

Not sure who says we have good single target when they all have nasty burst CDs as well for the 1 min boss fights that put them on par with me and beating me sometimes. Our single target is solely from S2M - without it we are really not good enough to justify losing so much AoE.

[Deleted]

Mindsear is actually in the 9k range, its only worth using for the insanity gain over mindflay.
200k 'aoe' is nothing compared to what other classes are capable of with 830+, im just sayin'.

Perhaps, but we already settled for the fact SP is bad in AOE.